Now With 5% More Fiber

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. — Gen. George S. Patton

The buzz this week, other than the Lil’ XT, is the activation of Strength of Wrynn/Hellscream’s Warsong. As everyone knows by now, this is (initially) an extra 5% damage, healing, and health. This buff by the end of the expansion will reach 30%.

It should be noted that talking to your faction leader and removing the buff will take it away for the entire reset. So be warned, there is no turning back (for a week at least) if you choose to go in without your King.

Blizzard’s continuation of using the “lore” of the Ashen Verdict to enhance and expand ICC is very solid. Giving players a small boost is a better direction than their former model of cutting off whole limbs of bosses to allow raid groups entry into the later portions of raid zones with little more than a foam sword rack.

Five percent isn’t going to let trade chat PUGs kill The Lich King (or even Festergut, most likely). What it will do is push guilds stuck at a particular point in the instance over the hump. Very small execution mistakes aren’t nearly as magnified. A little bit later in this post I’ll do a quick comparison between this week’s clear to last week’s Tuesday’s clear.

The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That’s pride f-cking with you. F-ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.–Marsellus Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Don’t turn off the buff. There is going to be that reptilian, competitive voice in the back of your mind, whispering to you “do it without the buff, claim a pre-nerf kill while all the scrubs get easy kills.”

My guess is that you’re working on one of the end wing bosses. You’ve been pulling Putricide 15 or 20 times a week, maybe more, and have gotten close. You’ve been to phase 3, you lose a tank around 10%, he heals, you try again. This time around you don’t quite make it to 35% because a couple people got clipped by a malleable goo.

The fights, as they are, are the same fights. What the 5% removes is that bit of a sharp edge that only tighter execution will solve. A slime puddle spawn right after a malleable goo landing would be a death 50% of the time before the buff. Now with a little extra health, and a little extra healing, the reaction time needed to save that situation has been lowered considerably.

Five more percent is not going to make people get their bites on the right people or kite the swarming shadows out to the edge of the room. It won’t close links, and it won’t move your frost beacon targets to the right areas.

When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things.-Joe Namath

What 5% will do is boost up your raid’s confidence and get them more gear, which in turn adds more of the above mentioned damage, health, and healing. Confidence is incredibly fickle. We had a famous raid night this past summer where we went from the Coliseum to Ulduar and proceeded to wipe out all of our remaining hard modes, scoring a server first Glory of the Ulduar Raider (25 man) for our Ironbound Proto-Drakes.

Our horde competition was dumb-founded. These BRM guys go from wiping for 5 straight nights to one and two shotting Freya+3 and Yogg+1 in the same night! It’s all about confidence and momentum. In my post about One Percent Wipes, I talked about how getting that near-wipe win propels your guild forward as much as losing it brings it down.

Working on harder content, getting that content down, and moving on makes everything you need to clear to get back to that progression point seem trivial. That little extra 5% might get you that Blood Queen or Sindragosa kill. Guess what? You’re now on The Lich King, a seriously epic, lore-packed encounter, and only one boss from starting in on hard modes and iLevel 277 loot.

Our kill this week was approximately 3 seconds faster than last week (an increase of about 1900 raid DPS). The composition we brought to BQL this week was missing the 3% raid hit buff and did not use our optimal bite order due to completing a Shadowmourne Blood Infusion. A straight 5% increase in DPS using the previous week’s comp would have been 198,142 Raid DPS for a kill around the 5 minute mark exactly.

This will allow us to spread some bites around onto healers and/or tanks to start knocking off those achievements for people in the coming weeks.

Those are links to healing meters just to show how bad I am trying to heal (and take vile gas) against our legion of arm waving trees. As you can see quickly, we were running with one extra healer in this week’s run compared to last week and still made out 17 seconds faster. I’m sure we could have done even better sticking some ranged in with the melee and dropping a healer, but the lag was flying fierce last night.

This is the first time I’ve gone in the portal on 25 man. Five percent more healing plus a little bit of a buff on the duration of the healing buff caused quite a significant improvement.

So, all in all, this isn’t a scientific breakdown, but the presence of the buff was very noticeable last night. The fight that it helped the most on was probably Sindragosa just due to the nature of phase 3.

Just an aside, you may want to grab an impartial combat log for showing Dreamwalker stats. The phasing messes up combat event capture, making the logs of anyone going into the portals unreliable. For instance, I typically see myself as doing dramatically more healing, percentage-wise, than people outside the portal report.